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Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

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Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#21

Post by Snoddas »

yreg wrote: post #15
StephenSmith wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took time to access the information. You had to turn on your modem and connect to the internet (took a while). Then you had to load up the information (took a while). Then there was the lack of good search engines, so you were worried you'd never find the information again. And most importantly, you couldn't pull up this information while out and about (there was no 3g/4g/5g).

Ok, but why print it out instead of saving it locally? (Other than to read it on the go? Did people do that?)

Not OP, but I used to do this regularly in the early '90s.

I accessed Usenet from my university, printed it very cheaply, and brought it home.

My home PC didn't have any internet connection until a couple of years later when I could afford a 9600bps modem.

As to diskdrives, when I started our uni-workstations could'nt read a dos/win3.1 disk

Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#22

Post by ziddoap »

gumballindie wrote: post #16
yreg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but why print it out instead of saving it locally? (Other than to read it on the go? Did people do that?)

A quick google search reveals that laptops and smartphones didnt exist back then.

?

Saving locally to a desktop computer surely existed back then, I even did it myself sometimes.

Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#23

Post by ksec »

DoubleDerper wrote: post #8

You can scan and OCR (adobe) this yourself with not much more effort than boxing and shipping at FedEx Then repost on related public-facing online forums or a free wordpress site or upload to archive.org

I get this answer a lot when I ask similar question but how do we scan it?

Taking a Photos of every print out from our Phone? That is 1000s of photos each needing to snap and focus.

Not everyone has a scanner, and not every scanner has automated tray feed. And even if they do the quality of their scan are really low by default.

I have similar question with Business Cards as well. I have hundreds if not thousands of them. But with no way to automatically archive them.

Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#25

Post by yreg »

ksec wrote: post #18
yreg wrote: post #12

A question from someone a bit younger: What was the purpose of printing out online discussions? Was it to read them while not at the computer? Was it to physically archive them?

>A question from someone a bit younger: I mean.... likely more than "a bit" younger :) 1. Computer not always available. A lot of the time it could be a "Family Computer". Not "Personal Computer". 2. There were far more detailed discussions than today, but computer are not portable so you want to read it may be while you are in bed. 3. Access information has a cost. Not only does it take time on a dial up modem. Tran…

Well, I'm over thirty, so I do remember metered connections and life without a smartphone. The shared computer reason explains it completely, thanks :)

Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#26

Post by mindcrime »

yreg wrote: post #20
gumballindie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick google search reveals that laptops and smartphones didnt exist back then.

What does that have to do with anything? Disk drives did exist.

> Disk drives did exist.

They did, but FWIW, they were very small and fairly expensive compared to contemporary times. The attitude towards using disk space was a bit different back then, because it was a much scarcer and more valuable resource.

Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#27

Post by icehawk »

yreg wrote: post #15
StephenSmith wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took time to access the information. You had to turn on your modem and connect to the internet (took a while). Then you had to load up the information (took a while). Then there was the lack of good search engines, so you were worried you'd never find the information again. And most importantly, you couldn't pull up this information while out and about (there was no 3g/4g/5g).

Ok, but why print it out instead of saving it locally? (Other than to read it on the go? Did people do that?)

Reading it on the go was a lot of it. Most of the things of the things I printed out at the time was because i wanted read it on the way to or from school.

Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#28

Post by I_Am_Nous »

yreg wrote: post #15
StephenSmith wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took time to access the information. You had to turn on your modem and connect to the internet (took a while). Then you had to load up the information (took a while). Then there was the lack of good search engines, so you were worried you'd never find the information again. And most importantly, you couldn't pull up this information while out and about (there was no 3g/4g/5g).

Ok, but why print it out instead of saving it locally? (Other than to read it on the go? Did people do that?)

Saving it locally wasn't as viable as it is today due to smaller storage drive sizes. Previously everything was printed out (or typed out via typewriter) and that was a norm for society for a long time.

Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?

#30

Post by toomuchtodo »

Hey there, I do some work with the Archive folks as an ad hoc physical archive volunteer. I'll pay for you to ship them and facilitate getting them ingested into items and a collection if you'd like. Let me know how to get in touch.

Once scanned, derive operations will take care of OCR and generating relevant metadata from the artifacts. If there are any issues (copyright, etc) preventing these items from being public, they'll be made private by patron services.

(no affiliation with the Archive, just a volunteer)

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